Category: Family life

Baptist Refusal to Baptize Their Children & Postmodern Refusal to Assign Gender to Their Children

Baptists are forever insisting that only those who can articulate their confession of Christ are to be Baptized.  John MacArthur gives us one such example,

“The significance of Baptism is unmistakably clear. In our day, an open solemn confession of the crucified risen Lord is necessary. All who experience the reality of the power of the risen Savior should give this public testimony to His glory as an act of obedience. In biblical Baptism in the New Testament manner, believers not only give testimony to their union with Christ…listen to this…they give testimony to their thoughtful, careful, submissive obedience to the holy Scripture in which nothing could be treated as unimportant.”

Since infants can’t give what MacArthur’s requires therefore infants are not to be recipients of Baptism as a means of Grace. Indeed, the genuine Baptist doesn’t even like calling Baptism a “means of Grace” since to speak like that is putting the emphasis on what God is doing in Baptism as opposed to the Baptist emphasis that Baptism is about what we are doing by being Baptized.

This is Baptist thinking. Children of Christians are not to be Baptized until they can name for themselves their own religious identity as Christian.

This thinking of the sovereign child, who can only be Christian in the context of their own self understanding is now bleeding off into other areas that make perfect sense given the Baptist premise of, “a child cannot choose their religious identity until they are epistemoligcally self conscious about what identity they want to choose.”

Think about it.

What is the difference between Baptist parents insisting that their children have to be epistemoligcally self conscious about what religious identity they want to choose and Modern parents now who are insisting that their children have to be epistemologically self conscious about what sexual identity those children want to choose? What we are saying here is that there is a harmony found in Baptist parents refusing to baptize their children and many modern parents today refusing to “baptize” their children into a predetermined gender believing, just as the Baptists believe, that their children should be able to have a say in the matter of what gender they will have.

Modern parents insisting that children must choose their own sexual identity is just the logical extension of Baptist parents insisting that children must choose their own religious identity.

The point here isn’t that there is an exact one to one correspondence on this matter. The point here is that when you start with the sovereign individual who must be consulted before covenantal realities are determined apart from his or her approval the end result, naturally enough, is sovereign individuals who must be consulted before any number of realities are determined apart from zhis or zhers approval.

Consistent Baptist thinking lends itself to the atomized individual and once the individual is atomized then he or she is free to be self determinate in every area of life from religion to sexuality to who knows where else.

Some will protest that this isn’t a fair analogy since baptism signifies a supernatural event whereas sex is a natural given. But to protest such as this is to miss the point of the analogy. The point of the analogy is not supernatural vs. natural. The point of the analogy is the sovereign individual choosing all. When it is realized that this is the point of the analogy then all protestations of my creating a “straw man” here lose their power.

Let me also add here that both in God’s covenantal ordering and in sexuality both Baptism and gender are objective categories. When one is birthed to Christian parents one is, objectively speaking, a member of the covenant and so is Baptized just as one is, objectively speaking, either male or female. There is a givenness in both being a member of the covenant and in our gender that is objective. That givenness may be twisted but it can never be changed.

I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends … Mickey Henry; A Christian Apologetic For Open Carry During Church Worship Services

Mickey Henry is a non de plume of a personal friend of mine who was recently rebuffed by his Church “leadership” for daring to open carry in Church in a state where to do so is legal. This is a letter he wrote to his leadership after being told he may not open carry in his “conservative” Church. Try to keep in mind that there was a time in the history of our country when it was not uncommon for men to carry their weapons to Church. I think that Mickey’s letter is convincing.

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Dear Elder Donnie

Since concealed carry is encouraged, we share a lot of common ground concerning self-defense and the errors of pacifism. Suffice to say, armed defense of innocents is simply the application of the positive requirements of the Sixth Commandment. The crux of disagreement, then, is open vs. concealed. Here, in brief, are my arguments for open carry:

1. I am of the strong opinion that open carry acts as a deterrent to violence. Open carry is essentially a clear statement that acts of aggression will be met with strong resistance.

2. To Christ is given all authority; all earthly authority is thus derivative. Because we Christians confess Christ as Lord, submitting to His Law-Word, Christians have a unique responsibility to rule under Christ as His earthly vicegerents. We are, in fact, commanded to do so by the Dominion Mandate. Weapons and related imagery, such as swords, spears, maces, the fasces, halberds, etc., are the customary tokens by which power and authority are symbolized and commonly recognized (the instruments of the death penalty are identified with the authority to execute the death penalty). I open carry as a visible symbol of my submission to Christ’s Law-Word, and my willingness to use the authority He has given me to defend my family and other innocent life.

3. Just as the Gospel is made clear in the symbols and liturgy of the Church, there is a certain visible representation of the Law-Grace dynamic in the open carry of weapons by confessing Christians: grace and mercy to the innocent, justice for those who would transgress His Law.

4. The degenerate culture around us tolerates Christians only if we are weak and impotent. But we are to be standard bearers, a city on a hill, no matter the spirit of the age. I am glad that a number of the men at Redeemer do carry weapons, but open carry makes manifest that ours is a vital faith, and we will not cower or lower ourselves to the popular image of the ineffectual Christian man engendered by the enemies of God.

5. As to scaring away visitors, I humbly submit that this is an expression of the “attractive Gospel” theories of the Kellerite/New Calvinist movement, and is at odds with the historical understanding of Calvinism. A work of God’s grace on His elect is to overcome their sinful aversion to the practical outworking of His Law. Large families, homeschooling, modest dress, infant baptism, all male leadership, advocacy for traditional marriage – these things and others in open view at Redeemer are offensive to the broader culture and even to some of our brethren in other denominations, but we practice them as the people of our Lord and Savior, and depend on the sufficiency of His grace to reach those who visit us. Additionally, this being Texas, I have little doubt that at least some visitors would be attracted by a sign of such vitality.

Notre Dame Philosophy Professor Reflects the Zeitgeist

The love of a mother is no more or less important than the love of a father. We all know this. But then, in general, mothers should be under no greater burden than fathers to abandon their callings for the sake of their children. The asymmetry in our responses to working mothers and fathers, then, suggests that other factors are in play. In an evangelical protestant context, the context I have in view here, there is good reason to suspect that these other factors include a tendency to devalue the gifts and contributions of women particularly in positions of teaching and leadership

Michael Rea
Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame

The above is culled from here,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-rea/mothers-in-ministry_b_8760590.html

Why, instead of the conclusion that Dr. Rea draws in his last sentence above, don’t we conclude that the reason Evangelical Protestants don’t want women in social order leadership is,

1.) The Scriptures forbid it.

2.) We so value women and their role in hearth and home that we don’t want to treat them like roses used as kindling to start a fire by turning them into ecclesiastical versions of “Rosie the Riverter?”

It is a fallacy to think that all because women are not treated like men therefore women are devalued in their gifts and contributions.

3.) We understand and affirm that men and women were not created to be interchangeable cogs as if both sexes were created to do the same thing.

Overall I would say it is Dr. Rea, and people like him, who are devaluing the gifts and contributions of women. It is people like Dr. Rea who are taking from children their Mothers who are to be the leaders and teachers of the most impressionable in our social order.

As a young lady, stay at home Mom, friend of mind said, in discussion about this article,

“With ‘men’ like Dr. Rea, who needs women to run for church office? We already have them!”

(And believe me when I tell you that this young lady, I’m quoting above, could run circles around any three Woman Pastors combined, you might want to name, in terms of giftedness in leadership and teaching.)

Finally, note the methodological way that the Left works here. Suggesting that men and women are interchangeable is put into such noble and glowing words and sentiments, while at the same time, the idea that women are distinct from men is made to look cruel and mean. The appeal to emotion is made with the consequence that the rational is bypassed. This is a common methodological tool of the unholy Left.

Walsh on the Deconstruction of the Family

The attack on normative heterosexuality — led by male homosexuals and lesbians, and invariably disguised as a movement for ‘rights,’ piggybacking on the civil rights movement of the 1960’s — is fundamental to the success of Critical Theory, which went straight at the hardest target (and yet, in  many ways, the softest) first. The reason was simple: If a wedge could be a driven between men and women, if the nuclear family could be cracked, if women could be convinced to fear and hate men, to see them as unnecessary for their happiness or survival — if men could be made biologically redundant — then that political party that had adopted  Critical Theory could make single women one of their strongest voting blocs.

And so Eve was offered the apple: In exchange for rejecting a ‘traditional’ sex role of supposed subservience and dependency (slavery, really), she would become more like a man in her sexual appetites and practices (this was so called ‘freedom’), and she would be liberated from the burdens of motherhood via widespread contraception, abortion on demand, and the erasure of the ‘stigma’ of single motherhood (should it come to that) or spinsterhood. Backed by the force of government’s fist, she would compete with men for jobs, high salaries, and social status, all the while retaining all her rights of womanhood. the only thing she had to do was help destroy the social order.

The results has been entirely predictable: masculinized women, feminized men, falling rates of childbirth in the Western world, and the creation of a technocratic political class that can type but do little real work in the traditional sense. Co-educational college campuses have quickly mutated from sexually segregated living quarters to co-ed dorms to the ‘hook up culture’ depicted by novelist Tom Wolfe in I am Charlotte Simmons to a newly puritanical and explicitly anti-male ‘rape culture’ hysteria, in which sexual commissars promulgate step-by-step rules for sexual encounters and often dispense completely with due process when adjudicating complaints from female students.

Crucially, at every step of the way, ‘change,’ from the old norms was being offered as ‘improvement’ or ‘liberation’ — more fulfillment, more pleasure, more experience. And yet, with each step, things got worse — for women. Eve’s bite of the apple sent humanity forth from the Garden, sadder but wiser. Today’s transgressive Western woman is merely sadder and often ends her life completely alone, a truly satanic outcome. G. K. Chesterton’s parable of the fence comes to mind, in the ‘The Drift from Domesticity,’ in The Thing (1929):

In the manner of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which probably will be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law, let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this, let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer, “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

A splendid example of Chesterton’s Fence was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, championed by Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. “Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will non inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area,” said the Massachusetts Senator. “In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think … The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.” Half a century on, those predictions have proved dramatically wrong: the question is whether Kennedy and his fellow leftists knew quite well at the time that there forecasts were bogus — although (as someone or other famously said) what difference, at this point, does it make?

In the same way, much of contemporary, ‘reform’ is marked by impatience, ridicule, and haste, cloaked in ‘compassion,’ or bureaucratic ‘comprehensivity,’ disguised as ‘rights’ prised out of the Constitution with a crowbar and an ice pick, and delivered with a cocksure snort of derision against any who would demur.

Michael Walsh
The Devil’s Pleasure Palace; The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West — pg. 88 – 89

Examining Dr. McDurmon and American Vision on Immigration

There simply is no biblical reason to refuse legitimate refugees. The Bible is clear that national borders should be open to all peaceful and law abiding individuals. Further, when we properly understand the meaning of the Bible’s teachings on immigrants, we will understand that to loathe refugees is to loathe ourselves and our own nation.

Dr. Joel McDurmon
American Vision

1.) First we would note that Dr. McDurmon confuses the issue somewhat by conflating the categories of “refugee” and “immigrants.” A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her home country, while an immigrant is someone who chooses to resettle to another country. There is a third category of “asylee” that is part of the conversation. These distinctions are important in this kind of conversation for without them it makes it even more difficult to make progress in the conversation.

2.) Dr. McDurmon makes this assertion in the face of what many have styled as “civilizational Jihad.” The recent deceased  Muammar Gaddafi, noted,

“We have 50 million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe—without swords, without guns, without conquest—will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”

Consistent with Gaddafi’s observation, authors Sam Solomon and E. Al Maqdisi in their book, “Modern Day Trojan Horse; The Islamic Doctrine of Immigration,” call Muslim immigration to the West a “modern day Trojan Horse.” They go on to note that,“Mohammed himself proclaimed that migration is jihad,” and provides a flourish with. “from the Islamic jurisprudence view the immigration of the Muslims to the West is to be regarded as the most important step on the ladder for achieving the establishment of an Islamic state in the West. This is the primary objective of Islamic Mission in the West.”

Dutch political leader, Geert Wilders again echoes the above sentiments by noting that, “gradual and incremental transformation of our societies and legal systems, or what is termed ‘Isalmisation’ of our democratic societies by the vast growing numbers of Muslim immigrants who are importing Islam into our Western way of life.”

Ann Corcoran in her book, “Refugee Resettlement and the Hijra to America,” writes Hijara means migration and, according to Islam’s doctrine and its quietly acknowledged organizational strategies, the goal of migration, today is not peaceful assimilation to the political system and mores of the host country. Instead, the goal is jihad by non-violent means known as civilizational jihad or Islamization.

Would Dr. McDurmon have us believe that God would be pleased with embracing a immigration pattern, the soul intent of which is squashing what little remains of Biblical Christianity, by a Muslim immigration horde intended to be used as a hammer of submission to obliterate the Christian remnant in the West and all this to the end of the Humanist attempt to establish a New World Order?

3.) Next we would note that Dr. McDurmon is  just wrong in this assertion above, as OT Scholar Dr. James Hoffmeier points out ,

“The very positive statements about the treatment of strangers in the Bible, some of which were already quoted, show compassion for the alien in ancient Israel. The defenders of illegal aliens point to these passages as the rationale for rewriting current laws. The problem is that they make a simplistic correlation between the ancient Israelite social law and the modern situation as if the Bible was addressing the same problem. Three important questions must be raised before one attempts to apply Israelite law to the modern situation: 1) Was there such a thing as territorial sovereignty in the second millennium B.C. when these laws originated; 2) Within that socio-legal setting, what was a “stranger” or “sojourner;” and 3) How does one obtain this status?”

The fact of the matter is that McDurmon has likewise rushed passed these distinctions just as he rushed by the distinctions between “refugee” and “immigrant.” McDurmon completely disregards the distinction between the differing words in the OT translated as differing times as “stranger,” “foreigner,” “alien,” and “sojourner.” This is a significant error and reveals a certain sloppiness on Dr. McDurmon’s part.

In point of fact, as Ehud Would has written, putting the strongest contradiction possible to Dr. McDurmon’s opening quote,

“In biblical law foreign races were permitted to enter the border only under patronage and direct legal oversight of a native. Whether ambassadors, contracted laborers, or slaves, they were forbade from owning land, ascending to any positions of political power, forbidden to marry members of the nation, and weren’t allowed to lend to natives at interest (though natives could do so toward them). Nor could aliens conscript natives to perpetual slavery, but natives could buy chattel slaves so long as they were of other peoples. And any of foreign breed who would not consent to these terms for entry of Israel’s border was regarded a hostile invader and subject to forcible expulsion as in the cases of the mass deportations under Ezra and Nehemiah.”

Dr. James Hoffmeier, unlike Dr. McDurmon in the opening quote, pays close attention to the different OT Hebrew words that are so significant in this discussion, and confirms much of Ehud Would’s observation immediately above,

“The delineation between the “alien” or “stranger” (ger) and the foreigner (nekhar or zar) in biblical law is stark indeed. The ger in Israelite society, for instance, could receive social benefits such as the right to glean in the fields (Leviticus 19:9-10; Deuteronomy 24:19-22) and they could receive resources from the tithes (Deuteronomy 26:12-13). In legal matters, “there shall be one statute for you and for the stranger who sojourns with you, a statute forever throughout your generations. You and the sojourner shall be alike before the LORD. One law and one rule shall be for you and for the stranger who sojourns with you” (Numbers 15:15-16). In the area of employment, the ger and citizen were to be paid alike (Deuteronomy 24:14-15). In all these cases, no such provision is extended to the nekhar or zar. In a sense, the gerwere not just aliens to whom social and legal protections were offered, but were also considered converts, and thus could participate in the religious life of the community, e.g. celebrate Passover (Exodus 12:13) and observe Yom Kippur, the day of atonement (Leviticus 16:29-30). They were, moreover, expected to keep dietary and holiness laws (Leviticus 17:8-9 & 10-12). It is well known that within Israelite society, money was not to be lent with interest, but one could loan at interest to a foreigner (nekhar). These passages from the Law make plain that aliens or strangers received all the benefits and protection of a citizen, whereas the foreigner (nekhar) did not. It is wrong, therefore, to confuse these two categories of foreigners and then to use passages regarding the ger as if they were relevant to illegal immigrants of today.”

4,) Another problem with Dr. McDurmon’s quote above is that Dr. McDurmon is calling for the State to have charity but as Dr. R. J. Rushdoony notes, “the state has no part in charity; the scripture never says that the state is to administer it. ” Rushdoony, in the same lecture,  “Justice and World Law,” offers about this issue of immigration,  “first of all they [illegal immigrants] have broken the law. And justice to everyone requires that the law be upheld. So if they are illegal aliens they should be deported. Now that’s justice because it’s comparable to breaking and entering into a man’s house.” From this quote we see that Dr. Rushdoony also disagrees with Dr. McDurmon’s opening quote.

In conclusion it is interesting that seemingly all of Institutional Christendom is insisting that civilizational Jihad must be embraced, and that the West must embrace its death by commandment of God. Whether it is the long acknowledged Left like the “Sojourners” organization or whether it is the Cultural Marxist Churches, or whether it is organizations like Lutheran World Relief or Catholic Relief Services or any number of other Denominational organizations what Christian laity are almost universally being told is that that if they don’t support the dissolution of themselves in their undoubted catholic Christian faith and as a people and  they don’t love Jesus and are guilty of Racism. This call to accept civilizational jihad now even comes from those organizations that heretofore were considered “conservative” such as American Vision.

Christians need to be assured that they can oppose immigration and still be considered Christ honoring. Opposition to the kind of immigration that is being foisted upon the West today can happen in the context of obeying the 1st commandment, the 5th commandment, and the 8th commandment. Opposition to the kind of immigration that is being foisted upon us today can be embraced on the basis of the admonition of the necessity to provide for one’s own household.  Opposition to the kind of immigration that is being foisted upon us today can be embraced on the basis of the same kind of love for our people that we find St. Paul expressing in Romans 9:3. In point of fact, I would insist that opposing the kind of immigration that is being foisted on the West today is the duty of every Christ loving Christian.

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